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First hifi experience...

MUTTY1

Waste of bandwidth
Mine was after six months on the North Sea rigs as a roustabout. Little tax, nothing to spend your money on, and, as it was a french rig, good food and wine. Flush with cash I bought a Sugden A48, an ERA TT and a planar headphone called a MicroSeiki with its own amp. This was just about portable and I travelled to Cornwall on the bus with the whole lot balanced on my lap. Only my rucksack travelled in the buses storage. London Victoria changing buses was rather stressful...

The Micro Seiki was thin soup but the Sugden and ERA lasted twenty Cornish years before replacement.
 
Notwithstanding my father’s then Sony kit, it was hearing the kit used by an older brother of one of my friends. I can’t remember which turntable but it fed an Audiolab 8000a amp and Rogers LS7s. That got me on the way...
 
Mine was 2 friend's Dad's kit: one was a Pioneer stack of flashy silver stuff with Celestion SL600's. I thought that sounded ace until I heard the Rega 3, Crimson amps and some TDF speakers. I couldn't really articulate why at the time but that just connected me more with the music. That was the one I wanted to listen on.
 
I was always interested, as a nipper had radiograms, reel to reel players; that kinda thing.

I was very proud of my first proper system paid for by paper round money, Sansui SR222/NAD 3020/KEF Concord IV.
 
My first jaw-dropping moment was hearing a friend's hifi, which had a pair of Electro-Voice loudspeakers fronted by Pioneer Series-20 electronics. That hifi made my Yamaha CA-420 based combo sound anemic. It was the first time that I realised a proper hifi does not need tone controls to boost the bass, and that a cassette deck (Pioneer CT-F900) could sound almost as good as vinyl records.
 
When I was 14 my Mum and Dad really surprised me by buying me a Music Centre. 80s silver. I can’t remember the make or anything but it began my affair with music and hifi. I listed to records, cassettes and more often Radio 3 and 4. I remember lying on my bedroom floor in the dark listening to all sorts of things. I went through a few more refined portables as a student and met my first Hi fi in the form of a Linn Sondek and Kans owned by my Hole- loving landlord. I then met my future wife who had an audiophile Dad. He then owned a brace of Naim and Kef Reference 107/2s. They made an astonishing din. He bought me my first kit as a wedding gift second hand. There began my journey.
 
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My (older) brother @Mark Packer ruined things for me ~11yrs old- iirc, Ariston RD80 + Linn Basik, no idea what cart; Quad 34/405-2; Tangent XLR2 monitors and ... music we still both enjoy to this day :)

... what goes up, must come down; what must rise must fall; and what goes on, in your life - is writing on the wall...!
 
Back in the early '60s we had weekly school music lessons. There was a school music trolley. a sort of mobile hifi, It was a single Quad ESL, a Quad mono tubed amp and a Garrard 301/SME deck. Once we went to a Mozart concert and the next week we dissected a performance and that music trolley sounded just like the concert. I was hooked and within 10 years I had the stereo solid state equivalent of that system - 401/SME/33/303/ESLs. That lasted until I went flat earth, still with the ESLs.
 
2nd year at uni, had a good summer job and bought a Thorens TD160, a JVC JAS11. Ot enough money for speakers, so made some Wharfedale Glendales from a kit with cabinets made from some blockboard ‘borrowed’ from an uncle’s work and cut with a jigsaw in the kitchen. They must have sounded terrible and weighed a ton, but they went loud! My first pay packet a few years later went on an sme 3009 arm and the speakers were eventually replaced with some Linn Kans and the amp with a Creek.
 
At age six my first grade class was taken on a field trip to a local chicken hatchery. At the end of the tour we were herded through the office, which was also the front room of the owner's residence, where there was a pretty nice for the time (1962-63) component stereo rig in a low cabinet. I think the amp was Fisher, there's no telling what the rest of it was. Some fairly innocuous background music was playing, but I was impressed and promised myself that someday I'd have one of those shiny gold music boxes with glowing tubes in the back.

One of our classmates was holding his hands over his ears exclaiming "It hurts my ears!" I always thought he was a pussy. It wasn't loud.
 
Slightly different here. 'Twas not my first audio system, but the dem. I received by the seller of a Jason valved amp I'd gone to buy. Maida Vale flat, deck unknown but Ortofon arm, cart.unknown. Wharfedale W3 speakers. 'Grand March' from Aida. I was blown away and have been hooked ever since. 1964.

Went through 1 Garrard, 1 Thorens deck, 2 Goldrings and got to a 401/SME3012/V15 by the time I entered college in 1970, plus Truvox, 2 Leaks, Revox amps + tuners, R2Rs etc.(memory fades).
 
My senior school had a Leak Stereo 70 amplifier and Sandwich speakers in the music room, so I guess that was the first I heard that was decent. My parents only had a Dansette changer and a handful of singles - mostly from Eurovision - Sandy Shaw I remember. Then they got a boxed set of Readers Digest classical classics (I still have this set - surprisingly well produced).

I had a mate with a job, so money. He bought a Pioneer A400 and some Mordaunt Short Pageant 2's from a hifi shop in Brighton. I 'assisted' the auditioning and was hooked. Took me a while to out earn him and sort myself out properly, but I was building a lot of stuff myself.. speakers, amps and turntable too.
 
Going with my Dad to Comet in Oxford sometime in the early 1970's and returning with a Rogers Ravensbrook receiver, Rogers speakers and a Pioneer turntable.
Not exactly "hifi" but a big step up from the family's Dansette.
The system was such a pride and joy to my Dad that he would take the fuses out of the receiver so we could not use it when he was away.
Mind you a few years later I bought my own set of "secret" fuses.

When my parents downsized I dropped off the system to my younger brother and he thrashed it to death in his Edinburgh flat.
 
My first real jaw dropping experience was when I listened to Emotional Rescue from the Stones on a Connoiseur TT, Sugden A48 (the orange, brown and off white one) and a pair of Tangent TM1.
That’s the day I fell in love with hi-fi !
 
Grew up with a tube radio in the corner of the living room - just loved the warm sound coming from it and the illuminated face plate covered with exotic station names - favourite for some reason was 'Hilversum'
Years later I went there - what an exceedingly dull town in turned out to be ....

Encountered many weird and wonderful play back set ups as a student in Liverpool in the late 'sixties (most of them very loud) but the first real 'HiFi' experience was a few years later listening to a Quad 33/303 over ESLs owned by a friend of a friend in Edinburgh. The owner was an Architecture graduate who had landed an assistant job designing utility buildings for the council and was a bit flush with cash.

The purity of the sound blew my mind at the time (was either that or the other stuff...)
 
The first time I heard a mind-blowing sound from a stereo system was back in late '89 or early '90; I was 16 or 17 at the time. I had stayed on at school for an extra year but because my secondary school had been earmarked for closure I had to complete that year at an alternative, nearby secondary school. In a nutshell, I became friends with a few other guys from that school and one of those guys had a great stereo. I've no idea what it was but it sounded nothing like anything I'd ever heard before. His parents were out on the day in question and so when he played the album Obscured by Clouds he played it really, really loud and it sounded totally fantastic!

We had an all-in-one cassette, radio and record player at home and although it was fine for listening to music, it wasn't great by any means. But with nothing to compare it to, I thought it was as good as cassette, radio and record players got... until I heard my new classmates stereo. I don't think it would have been anything we now know as classic British hi-fi but, whatever it was, it was a huge step up from what we had at home.
 
Mine was aged about 16 at boarding school. It was more stereo than HiFi. I sent off for a stereo pickup cartridge from a small ad in something like Practical Wireless. Fitted it to a Dansette and ran a second lead across to an old valve radio that had an aux input. Put on Pinball Wizard, that opening riff where there is a long strum on one channel then a twang of lead guitar from the other. I was hooked for life.
 


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